Automatic bottle-turning apparatus exists for small bottles. Thus, upright small filled bottles may be conveyed through mechanical turn guides, which twist the bottles 90 degrees so that they are on their sides. This is done typically to facilitate loading the bottles into packages.
It is believed that no comparable practical, commercial apparatus has been devised for rotating upright large filled bottles, such as filled 5-gallon water bottles, onto their sides. However, it is necessary to turn such bottles onto their sides in order to load them into racks for storage and for transportation to customers.
Hand turning such bottles is awkward and involves substantial labor costs, as well as risk of back injuries. The inventor tried to adapt existing mechanical turn guides (used with small bottles, as described above) to this purpose for 5-gallon water bottles, but found the expedient unsatisfactory. Because of the great weight of the bottles (approximately 45 pounds), considerable force was needed to turn upright bottles onto their sides. It was possible to do this with a very long mechanical guide, through which bottles were automatically conveyed by a powered conveyor. But there were numerous problems. First, the bottles tended to twist (axially rotate) in the guide instead of turning over onto their sides. The guides had to be very long, with a gradual turn, to keep the bottles from simply jamming up in the turn guides. Space is at a premium in bottle loading plants, however, making such a long turn guide mechanism impracticable.
When such bottles were passed through the guide at a high throughput rate, in close proximity to one another, they particularly tended to interfere with one another and tilt out of proper alignment. That is, the axis of each bottle tended no longer to be perpendicular to the direction of travel of the bottle through the guide. The result was that the bottles slipped and piled up against each other.
In order to solve the problem of automatically turning these heavy bottles on their sides, which was necessary to permit the bottles to be automatically loaded into racks (for example, by the Automatic Bottle Loading Apparatus described in the inventor's copending patent application, Ser. No. 601,932 now U.S. Pat. No. 5,074,103), the inventor invented the invention described hereinbelow. It is believed that the invention described here is the first practical and compact commercial automatic bottle-turning machine for heavy bottles.